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Saturday, January 15, 2011

Dan Brown's novelistic version of Catholicism vs science is falsehood piled on fabrication, but it's true enough that the two don't exactly agree on everything. Pope Benedict is the latest to try to bridge the gap. Echoing something his predecessor once said to Stephen Hawking, Benedict said there was no problem with the Big Bang (which was proposed by a Catholic priest in 1927, BTW) but that before a universe described by physical laws burst into being, the Creator had shaped the moment. Some physicists argue that there simply could not be a "before" the big bang: the concept is meaningless. That's not much easier to get your head around than a supernatural Creator, is it?